Nation building: Personal Rumination in midst of battle

Nation building: Personal Rumination in midst of battle

The way Arvind Kejriwal went about demolishing one party's claim on honesty after another with clarity, documents, strategy and complete candour is unparallel. His honesty and truth comes out so vividly on TV, that he has become the hero of this nation. In a nation starved of icons (so starved that we used of think of Rahul Gandhi as a youth icon), here was a ray of hope. I have known him for many years and he is a complete WYSWYG (What you see is what you get). There is no pretence, no fake attitude, no game playing. Completely obsessed with serving the nation, by what he thinks is the right way. The inner clarity and truth makes him also fearless. 

Eat Slowly!

Okayyy. I am here posting after a long gap..
I have always been a slow eater.. Everyone around will finish and be ready to get off the table, but I would still be eating.. Sometimes it was a lil embarrassing to keep others waiting and/or thinking on how much I eat ;)
Thought sharing an article on some of the benefits of eating slowly..
Important point(s) being:
"Japanese researches found that eating fast is associated with insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is a silent condition that increases the chances of developing diabetes and heart disease. Also, fast eating seems to be a risk factor for the metabolic syndrome (combination of the symptoms such as high blood pressure, obesity, high cholesterol, and insulin resistance)."

and "Eating slowly gradually reduces the appetite from the time you begin to eat. It takes the brain about 15-20 minutes to start signaling feelings of fullness. And if you have no appetite, you end up eating less"

For other benefits and complete article jump on here..

Mental toughness, +ve attitude and Learning from Mistakes..

Nice article on Yahoo! by Jim Citrin

For Grace Under Fire, Practice Makes Perfect

The article even though discusses things which probably people know, but it definitely refreshes some important things to again focus on and remember, which we tend to relegate from our conscious mind..

The article is posted below, in case the link stops working:
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"I was mentally weaker on the important points."

That's how tennis star Novak Djokovic summed up his loss to player Roger Federer, who overcame seven set points to win his 12th Grand Slam and become the first man in more than 80 years to capture four straight U.S. Open tennis titles.

Perhaps you're an investment professional confronting swirling equity and debt markets that are as daunting as the raucous nighttime crowds at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Or you might be a manager trying to keep your team together and your customers loyal as upstart competitors seem to appear out of nowhere.

Are you responding to the pressure like the cool, calm, and collected Federer, who delivers in the moment of truth? Or are you more like the talented but tortured Djokovic, whose emotions led him to tense up when it counted most?

A Learnable Skill

The answer lies in your mental toughness. If you believe that the ability to perform best in the most important moments is genetically endowed, i.e., you either have it or you don't, then you're not alone.

Most people look upon those special performers -- the trader who can exploit market chaos or the quarterback who pulls out a come-from-behind victory -- as fortunate aberrations.

But mental toughness is a learnable skill. With knowledge of how your mind and emotions work, deliberate practice in high-stakes situations, and focus and patience, you can develop this ability. When you do, you'll experience winning results and break through to a new level of performance and success.

Unemotional Rescue

It turns out that there are different areas of the brain that govern us when we're thinking clearly and calmly versus when we're operating in a state of anxiety or fear.

We perform at our best when we're guided by the area of the brain that plans and reasons. When we're nervous or fearful, however, the more base motor areas of the brain -- the ones that produce emotions -- take over.

Being guided by your emotions leads you to think short-term, seeking out instantaneous results or immediate gratification at the expense of strategy. Your emotions deceive you into believing that the way to perform best at any moment is to react with dramatic actions or bold strokes, even if being deliberate is actually the right course of action.

Embrace Your Failures

So how do you set about developing mental toughness? Through focused practice of how to think correctly in important situations, through building up a body of knowledge of how to deal with mistakes and setbacks, and through positive imagery.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, winning in any endeavor depends on a robust history of failure. To learn how to win under pressure, you first need to learn the proper mental attitude toward mistakes. You don't want your mistakes to be so important in your mind that they lead you to play it safe. Thinking of mistakes as the stepping stones to winning liberates you to keep challenging yourself and taking calculated risks.

When you do make mistakes, you need to assess them constructively. Properly evaluated, mistakes give you valuable feedback, allowing you to make corrections so that you don't repeat the mistake. But while it's important to recognize and analyze mistakes when they occur, it's just as essential to not think that acknowledging them is a sign of weakness. The ability to think about mistakes and remain positive is a sign of strength.

The reality is failure is always possible, even for the best performers in the world. Say you blew a client presentation and lost the business that should have been yours. Guess what? It also happens to the greatest rainmaker. Or you hit an easy overhead into the net. Well, so did Roger Federer in the Open final. If the best performers make mistakes, it only makes sense that it'll happen to you.

Performance Doesn't Determine Character

Beyond acknowledging the value of mistakes, there's a deeper reality that will help you free yourself from a debilitating fear of failure. That fear is often the result of an unacknowledged belief that the results of your efforts and your quality as a person are inexorably linked.

In truth, there's no connection between the results you achieve at work (or in sports) and your quality as a human being. This simple but profound insight can free you to be a more natural and mentally tough performer in all aspects of your life. The reason is that if you link mistakes to who you are as a person, you'll exaggerate the emotional responses of your actions.

Either consciously or subconsciously, your emotions lead you to think that if you perform poorly you did something wrong -- or worse, that you're a bad person. But just because things don't work out doesn't mean you've erred. You may have made the absolutely right decision and failed in the execution. Or maybe you selected the right course of action and did everything you were supposed to do, but your competitor got lucky.

It's equally important to know that just because something worked out well doesn't mean you did something right or were thinking correctly. You may have made the wrong decisions and just got a lucky break. If it worked this time, don't count on it happening again, especially when the stakes are high.

The Power of Positive Imagery

Applying positive imagery helps you prepare in advance for high-pressure situations and to recover your focus when necessary. High-quality images of your best client presentation, fairway iron, free throw, or team meeting allow you to experience yourself doing it right and help you feel ready to perform to your highest skill level.

These multi-sensory images take you where you want to go, and often where you've not yet been. Exercise deliberate practice to develop positive imagery skills.

For instance, Ted Williams, the greatest batter in baseball history, was meticulous about studying opposing pitchers. He would imagine what they would throw to him and then picture how he would react.

Mental Toughness in Business

In business, clarity of thought is the equivalent of mental toughness in sports. The ability to think through problems proactively using your mind rather than being reactively led by your emotions leads to high degrees of performance in business.

It entails performing an accurate assessment of a situation and focusing your decisions around the things that are under your control, rather than obsessing over outside factors. It's planning for contingencies and updating your action plan to take account of new information, and also making tough people calls, even if doing so means making some people unhappy.

To summarize, the mentally tough person is guided by a disciplined mind, which can be developed through the consistent practice of not letting your emotions guide you.

Dale Carnegie page - Some takeaways for everyone..

Most of the people already have heard and/or read Carnegie's books (My first one I had bought at a railway station when I was may be 14 years young :) )

Found this interesting site that has a very concise summary to four of the very famous books by him. Read the summaries here:

How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948)

Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business (1931)

Don't Grow Old - Grow Up! (1956)

20 timeless money rules.. on investing

Money Magazine collected the best advice from some of the smartest investors (and other people) who have ever lived. Read the article: 20 timeless money rules

Main takeaways:

• Diversify / Mix up with appropriate asset allocation, across various sectors/industries/regions/mid-large-small caps..
• Take advantage of the power of Dollar Cost Averaging, over a long period of time.. (Only the lucky ones who can look into future can time the market.. )
• Do not panic. Stay invested and continue investing..

Interesting tidbit:

• In every bull market since 1970, stocks have dropped by 10% or more at least once. Average time to get back to even: 107 days.
• Over time, markets tend to stick close to their long-term trends, called "regression to the mean." Manias and panics never last

Mera Bharat Mahaan.. An upbeat article about India and Tata group in particular..

Read the article here:

India's nice, but Tata wants more

Tata Group is the biggest conglomerate in one of the world's fastest growing markets. But being a huge firm in a huge country isn't enough for chairman Ratan Tata, the latest in a long family line to lead the venerable Indian firm. He has set his sights on something even bigger: making Tata India's first truly multinational company. One day, he hopes, Tata will be his country's global brand, as recognizable as Japan's Sony or Finland's Nokia.

Even a decade ago, it would have been easy to dismiss Tata's ambitions. Back then it was still an overwhelmingly Indian company. Founded in 1868 by industrialist and nationalist Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata and built by his successors into a maker of everything from trucks to salt to software, it was well-known and respected at home but virtually invisible overseas. Then, six years ago, Mr. Tata gathered his top executives in the gentlemanly confines of Bombay House, the company's marble-floored headquarters where vanilla ice cream is distributed at 3 p.m. daily. Tata, he told them, was going international.

Since then Tata has made 22 foreign acquisitions. Its hotel group, which owns the ornate Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, has snapped up Boston's Ritz-Carlton and New York's Pierre hotels. Another arm of the company bought a host of undersea communications cables from Tyco International, making Tata the biggest carrier of international telephone calls in the world. Meanwhile Tata's automobile arm bought the truck division of Daewoo Motor Co. Ltd., the South Korean giant. Tata's latest big gulp saw it swallow the Anglo-Dutch steel maker Corus earlier this year for $13-billion (U.S.)

And that is only the beginning. Tata, which already has operations in 54 countries, has plans to invest billions more overseas in the next few years. The latest rumours have Tata Motors Ltd. buying Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Co. Already, Tata has seen its international revenue grow from 22 per cent of the company's total take in 2003 to more than 60 per cent today.
Print Edition - Section Front


The obvious question is, Why? Why go to all the trouble of doing business in Uruguay and China and Hungary when things are going so well at home? India's economy has been pelting along, with a growth rate of 9 per cent in the last couple of years. Tata has been expanding to meet the domestic need. At the moment it is building three brand new steel plants, two new automotive factories and a series of power plants -- all right at home in India.

Part of the reason for the overseas drive is sheer ambition and national feeling. Mr. Tata made it clear that pride had a lot to do with his stubborn pursuit of steel maker Corus. But there is more to it than that.

Mr. Tata is no robber-baron capitalist. Retiring and modest in personal style, he drives himself to work in a simple family car. His company gives away much of its wealth to charity through a series of trusts and endowments.

So he is not buying things just for the sake of owning them. He believes that, in the modern world, going global is simply a matter of necessity. It spreads the company's risk over many countries and regions, so it is less exposed to a downturn back home. It builds efficiency by letting companies manufacture for scale. And it keeps his companies abreast of international advances in technology and business practice.

One of his top executives, Alan Rosling, a Briton whose presence in the Tata hierarchy symbolizes its internationalism, was in Toronto last week to give a speech. He explained that the global strategy began after Tata Motors suffered the biggest corporate loss in Indian history in 2001, a result of a sharp drop in truck sales. The company realized that as long as it was in just one market, such painful swings were inevitable. "We think you have no choice: very carefully but aggressively move into other markets." Seen this way, Tata's internationalization is less a product of daring than of caution.

Whatever its motives, the strategy stands to transform both Tata and, by extension, Indian business. Indian companies were involved in 177 merger and acquisition deals in 2006, compared with 99 for China. With more talented executives and more flexible management, Indian companies are showing they are ahead of China in what Harvard business professor Tarun Khanna calls "soft infrastructure" -- brains instead of bridges.

If other Indian companies can emulate Tata's attempt to become a truly modern multinational -- technologically up to date, talent-rich, geographically and culturally diverse, serving many markets from many places -- then India may find itself catching up to China in the great race of the 21st century.

China's Golden Cyber-Shield

An interesting article on Forbes.com.. An insight into future cyberwarfare..

China's Golden Cyber-Shield

The Chinese government is an infamous enforcer of digital apartheid; when its citizens try to access prominent international Web sites like Wikipedia and Flickr, they hit a filter that blocks politically sensitive material. In the West, that information blockade is often described as the "Great Firewall of China."

But in Mandarin, it is called jindun gongcheng, the Golden Shield. As that name implies, China's controls on the Internet are capable of blocking inbound as well as outbound traffic. And according to some security professionals, that means the Golden Shield is more than just a barrier to free expression; it may also be China's advantage in a future cyber-war. Click to read the complete article..